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Enhancing the Out-of-Box experience of Tivoli Netcool®/Omnibus deployments Head-On Breeze is a tailored version of IBM Tivoli® Netcool® addressing the common needs of operators. Breeze al-lows operators
to reduce the number of alarms presented and time to resolving them -
using the various included auto-matic, semi-automatic and manual tools. Breeze is presently used by a number of customers, including the Israeli Air Force,
HOT Telecom (a triple player operator) and Cellcom – Israel's largest cellular operator.
The Tivoli/Netcool solution by IBM ad-dresses the needs and concerns of net-work operators.
It provides the means to answer questions like: Is my network do-ing OK? Where is a fault taking place?
Who is affected? When did it last happen? Who is responsible to get it fixed? By augment-ing event data,
and providing it in the right context, operators can substantially
re-duce MTTR (mean-time-to-repair) and make a big difference. Breeze by Head-On makes this difference even bigger by further providing an additional feature set. Some of the major ones include: • Alarm Toggling – For those times where problems toggle or "flap" rapidly or briefly, flooding operators with alarms that are automatically resolved in a few seconds – sometime going unseen. Tog-gling "freezes" those faults, making sure the operators are aware of them, to prevent them reoccurring in the future. • Parent-Children relationships – Intro-ducing hierarchy into the event list re-duces clutter and better presents prob-lems and their root-cause. Be it a topo-logical, business, containment or other relation type - Parent-Children allows operators to create, modify, rearrange and break families of events. Operators can show all family members, only par-ents, orphans (children whose parent no longer exists) and so forth. Designed as a system-wide mechanism, families can be created automatically using Impact poli-cies or Automations, and co-exist with ITNM and NCIL, root-cause relations. • ScheduleSet – Some events can be safe-ly disregarded depending on a schedule such as a late-night maintenance win-dow, a public holiday, weekends, etc. ScheduleSet mechanism allows associat-ing such schedules with events and ei-ther discard them or defer them to the end of the schedule window. • Heartbeat – for those devices and data sources were "no news" can mean "bad news", the Heartbeat mechanism can point out awkward silences based on in-dividual data-source reporting interval expectations. If a device did not gener-ate an event within the given time – an event is generated to alert that the de-vice might not function correctly. • Group Repeating – sometimes a certain amount of events, residing simultane-ously in the object server, is the only real indication of a critical fault (such as in the case of multiple redundant servers). Group Repeat makes it possible to mark those events in groups and raise faults only when they occur together. In designing Breeze, we put a strong em-phasis on reusability, interoperability, and the ability to combine functionality of the different features within the solution (such as deferred repeating event or a toggling heartbeat message) and with other parts of the Tivoli/Netcool suite (such as Tivoli Netcool/Impact, TADDM, TBSM, ITNM, etc.) Breeze combines tools and services to adapt them to specific Tivoli/Netcool de-ployments.
For more information about Breeze and other solutions from Head-On, please contact |
• Alarm Deferring – experience shows that operators start reviewing certain alarms only if they persist
for a specific amount of time. For example, when cer-tain radio links are down operators usu-ally wait 2 minutes
before further inves-tigating the alarm due to its transient nature.
Deferring allows hiding such alarms for a set amount of time, so op-erators know that once presented - these
alarms require their attention. Manual deferring is also available, for those times where alarm should be "snoozed".
• Alarm Repeating – When certain events only matter when they reoccur above a certain frequency,
Alarm Repeating al-lows you to set just this threshold –
and determine when alarms should be pre-sented based on the number of times they repeated 
• Message Dispatcher – A single hub
mechanism for all the messaging needs: e-mails, SMS and even fax messages: makes sure
critical events won't go un-noticed, using the customer existing message dispatching software.
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